The Lost Village

The spring weather has been lovely here - sunshine and clear skies, but still cool enough to walk up into the mountains.

We went off to explore some of the ancient 'Pilgrim Paths' in the Alpi Apuane - this one starting on the hill just above our little house.  I'm not sure why they call them Pilgrim paths because they seem to have been constructed to connect the little hamlets on the mountainside with each other and with the towns on the coastal plain.  Some of them were also used by workers in the marble quarries - many of whom walked for two hours to get to work and then two back.    They're beautifully constructed with paved edges and cobbled centres, navigating precipitous slopes.

In the spring weather, the stones were dotted with wild crocuses and narcissi growing up through the cracks.

Most of the paths are very well marked, with red dots, as alpine routes - but somehow, in the chestnut forest, we took a wrong turning and found ourselves in a thicket of bamboo.  It was only then that we realised that we were in the centre of a ruined village.  We should have noticed the clumps of daffodils - remnants of someone's garden, and the beautiful stone walls - all that's left of the terraces they cultivated.

The houses had almost completely vanished.  This photograph was taken from about 15 feet away from one of them and, although it's straight in front,  you can hardly see it at all. 

Down crumbling steps we found what had once been the village piazza.  Under a chestnut tree that had taken root in the wall was a water cistern fed by a spring, and a carved trough for washing people and laundry.

As we looked we began to see more and more houses hidden under the cover of wild clematis and bramble.
Doors swung open on scenes of desolation.

The front walls of some houses had collapsed into the valley.  From one window I could see the mountains through the remains of what had once been three houses.

We found our way back to the path (it was so obvious we must have been talking or looking at the view in order to miss it!)  and soon began to notice more ruins among the trees.  This was our favourite - glorious views and much of it still standing.  I sat on the front step and fantasised about living there.

The sad thing is that the path we were on leads to Sant' Anna - location of one of the worst massacres in Italy during WWII.  These villages too would have been searched and 'cleansed' by troops looking for partisans.  That's one reason they're deserted.  The other is that living up here is hard - people want electricity, running water, roads. 

Two more beautiful things I found in the woods - a magical tree bole like a sculpture and some red, red moss on a silver rock.

Tuesday Poem: Poetry in Translation - Tomas Transtromer

April and Silence

Spring lies desolate.
This velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.

The only thing that shines
is yellow flowers.

I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnbroker’s.


April Och Tystnad

Våren ligger öde.
Det sammtesmörka diket
krälar vid min sida
utan spegelbilder.

Det enda som lyser
är gula blommor.

Jag bärs i min skugga
som en fiol
i sin svarta låda.

Det enda jag vill säga
glimmar utom räckhåll
som silvret
hos pantlånaren.


Aprile e Silenzio

La primavera giace deserta.
Il fossato di velluto scuro
serpeggia al mio fianco
senza riflessi.

L’unica cosa che splende
sono fiori gialli.

Son trasportato dentro la mia ombra
come un violino
nella sua custodia nera.

L’unica cosa che voglio dire
scintilla irraggiungibile
come l’argento
al banco dei pegni.


I have the Bloodaxe ‘Collected Poems’ of Tomas Transtromer in English, but - because I’m learning the language, I also have his ‘Sad Gondola’ collection (La Lugubre Gondola) in Italian, and this edition includes the original poems in Swedish. So, by a happy accident, I’m able to read three different versions of the same poems - in three different languages - and I thought it might be fun to compare them. Looking at poems in translation can sometimes give additional insights into the meaning, but it always raises the questions, ‘what is a good translation?’ and ‘is a translation a new poem altogether?’

Transtromer himself has written that ‘theoretically we can, to some extent justly, look at poetry translation as an absurdity. But in practice we must believe in poetry translation.’ He goes on to explain what he means by this, that there are two ways of looking at a poem. ‘You can perceive a poem as an expression of the life of the language itself, something organically grown out of the very language in which it is written. ... impossible to carry over into another language.’ But you can also believe that ‘the poem as it is presented is a manifestation of another, invisible poem, written in a language behind the common languages. Thus, even the original version is a translation.’ The Italian translator of his poems goes further and adds that every reader makes their own translation - for each one ‘the text is the same, but the poetry is different.’ So, no poem, in whatever language, is ever the same for every person. The important thing, she writes, is what happens between the text and the reader.


The English versions, by Robin Fulton, are excellent and come from a close partnership with the poet. George Szirtes writes in Poetry London that, ‘Transtromer has entered the English language as if he had been born to it, floating in Anglo-American space with an ease denied to many other’. In Italy Transtromer is translated by Gianna Chiesa Isnardi and the poems are very, very close to the English (I can't judge on the Swedish). Essential features of the poem’s structure have been kept, such as the repetitions in stanza two and four ‘L’unica cosa’, ‘Det enda’, ‘The only thing’. The length of the lines remains more or less the same and most of the words are simple equivalents. ‘Som en fiol’, ‘come un violino’, ‘like a violin’.

April and Silence translates very well - a straight-forward transmission of meaning using the repetitions of ideas and phrases, exactly chosen words. But the sounds and rhythms are very different. Looking at the unfamiliar symbols of the original Swedish I’d assumed that it would have a rougher sound than the Italian or English, but a Swedish friend here read it for me and I was surprised at the lyrical quality of the language. Smooth, musical and beautiful, more equivalent to the Italian than the English.  I hadn't expected it to sound like that. This is a glimpse of Transtromer reading in Swedish.



For More Tuesday Poems please visit the Tuesday Poets hub at http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

I'm having fun getting about a bit this week - also guest-blogging about 'The Itinerant Muse'  over at Wendy Robertson's brilliant blog  A Life Twice Tasted

and writing about women's diaries and letters 'What Survives of Us....' on Michelle McGrane's wonderful Peony Moon.

Mother's Day and Julia Copus' Ghost Lines

I'm a bit ambivalent about having 'days' for particular people or things. But 'Mother's Day' has such a long history - back to the Virgin Mary, and before that to the pagan mother goddesses we worshipped millenia ago.  Even nature, the earth, was seen as a woman.  Maybe to do with the mysterious processes of giving birth - it seemed such a miracle, and women risked their own lives in the process of giving life to a new human being.  It also seems an appropriate day to remember those who long to have a child, yet can't.  There's a moving series of poems by Julia Copus about the gruelling process of IVF, and its failure, called Ghost Lines, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in December 2011.    Although the programme doesn't seem to be available for re-viewing at the moment, there's a trailer clip from the Fiction Factory .  Ghost Lines is short-listed for the prestigious  Ted Hughes prize for new work in poetry and is also in the current issue of Poetry London. 

I particularly loved 'Inkling'  which begins

Last night I sensed a taking root
under the bonecage of my heart,
a stirring, shifting;  something not
quite of a breath or heartbeat's weight.

It was the inkling of a soul.
Now I shall have no peace at all
till he's caught and fastened, nested in
the cradle of my pelvic bone......

These poems are very, very special and I'm looking forward to reading them again in her next collection The World's Two Smallest Humans, due from Faber in  July 2012.

Also remembering my own lovely mother today.  I'm grown up enough to stand on my own two feet now, with grown up daughters of my own, but I still miss her.  This photo is of her as a girl and I'm amazed how Italian she looks!  - all those maternal relatives in Genoa, whose names I would love to know.

Travelling, travelling, travelling .......

So far four trains, two buses, a plane, a London underground ride and a taxi;  two hotels and a succession of coffees in paper cups and tasteless sandwiches.   No wonder I'm feeling a touch jaded.  And my poor laptop has  been trying to connect to so many internet hotspots it's become confused!   I'm currently in Ipswich giving a talk on Katherine Mansfield to the Suffolk Book League - a lovely group of book enthusiasts it was a pleasure to meet.   Waterstones even managed to sell a few books.  But I wonder whether audiences have any idea what an effort writers make to meet readers and talk to them about their work?

I haven't been to Ipswich before and at first glance it seems like most modern English town centres - hardly any old buildings left and most space taken up by a pedestrianized shopping mall with all the usual suspects;  Monsoon, Debenhams, H&M, McDonalds, Gap, Benetton, Costa coffee, M&S.   There is, apparently, another face to Ipswich - the waterfront - which I haven't seen yet. 

There are lots of very young mums here, strolling around with their babies in buggies - some of them don't even look old enough to have left school.   That's something you don't see in Italy and I wonder why?  Do Italian girls have better things to do than have babies as teenagers?  Most wait until their late twenties or early thirties.  Cultural differences?  The family group is certainly stronger and more important in Italy than it is over here, so perhaps young girls feel less compelled to begin their own.  But there's also a demographic shift in Italy - the birth rate is dropping and the government are worried about it.

Now I'm about to start the journey again in reverse - taxi, trains, bus, plane (fog permitting) and hopefully Neil will be waiting for me at Pisa airport around midnight.   It's sunny over there he tells me and tonight the sky should be clear enough to get another look at Venus and Jupiter together - the brightest objects in the night sky.

Tuesday Poem: A Syrian Poet in Homs - Tal al-Mallouhi

You will remain an example

I will walk with all walking people
And no
I will not stand still
Just to watch the passers by
This is my Homeland
In which
I have
A palm tree
A drop in a cloud
And a grave to protect me.

This is more beautiful
Than all cities of fog
And cities which
Do not recognise me
My master:
I would like to have power
Even for one day
To build the “republic of feelings.”

Tal al-Mallouhi
(Translated by Ghias al-Jundi)


Tal al-Mallouhi is a young Syrian poet and blogger, born in Homs, arrested aged 19 accused of spying for foreign countries and sentenced to 5 years in prison in 2009.   This is her brief biography from the internet:

“al Dosr al-Mallohi (al-Mallouhi) (Arabic: طل الملوحي ) born in Homs January 4, 1991. She is considered the World's youngest prisoner of conscience. On 27 December 2009, Tal was taken from her home by officers of one of the security offices in Syria because she has written poems about Palestine and social commentaries on her blog.  Since then, her parents don't know which security office has detained her nor where they can visit their daughter. Tal al-Mallouhi has been accused by the Syrian government of being a spy for the United States of America, and sentenced on February 15, 2011 to five years in prison.”

For more about her situation please look up English Pen who are trying to publicise her plight by sharing her poetry with as many people as possible.



For more Tuesday Poems please visit the Tuesday Poem website at http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com
where thirty poets from around the world post a poem every Tuesday.

And today the wonderful Michelle McGrane has featured my new collection 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21' on the brilliant poetry site 'Peony Moon'.  Thanks Michelle!

40 Women Sculptors for International Women's Day

As it's International Women's Day today, I thought it might be appropriate to post something about an exhibition celebrating the work of 40 women sculptors who have lived and worked in Pietrasanta during the last fifty years.

Whatever you think of gendered events, (and I know many of the women here are very ambivalent about them) it's difficult to turn down the opportunities that positive discrimination sometimes presents.   The work featured in this exhibition is extremely varied in style and subject matter and the sculptors come from almost every part of the world, including USA, Italy, Norway, Venezuela, Russia, Europe, and Japan.

They were all interesting, and I had my own personal preferences, but here are some that I found really interesting.  Sadly, one of my favourites, 'Dancing in the clouds' by American Shelley Robzen, can't be shown because it was highly polished black marble in a spotlighted situation which didn't photograph.  In fact, it was difficult to get any good photos at all, given that the church 'St Agostino' has no natural light.

My favourite artist of the older group,  Alicia Penalba (from Buenos Aires) died in 1982.  Her 'Trilogie'  - the three bronze figures standing at the entrance to the church, is really beautiful.

The gesso maquette for Grand Gisant reminded me of dinosaur vertebrae.

Again in the older group, the Italian Fiore de Henriquez who died in 2004, had a strange, almost feral bronze figure, full of quite violent life.  It's called 'Ippogrifo' - the Hippogriff.

I loved this small, alien landscape with its lonely figure by American Jill Watson who now lives near Pietrasanta.  It's called Giardino - garden.

This relief, by Swiss artist Maja Thommen, looks simple, but is incredibly intricate. She's a very interesting artist who paints, creates installations and also performs with a gypsy punk band.  It's called Donna Velata - veiled woman.

Dutch sculptor Margot Homan exhibited this bronze figure of a women holding her finger to her mouth - Il Silenzio.  It's very finely balanced.

There were some images that I found quite disturbing, including this male, almost zombie-like figure by young Italian artist Elena Bianchini.

Altogether a fascinating exhibition.  I'd have loved to do a creative writing workshop with it!

Tuesday Poem: Minding Isabella

She isn't sure of me, this occasional person
she calls Abuela, whose DNA she shares
across two generations and two languages.
I don't always understand her.  'Agua' she says
holding out a cup.  'Donde esta mi madre?' 
The lip quivers, and her face tilts up, reflecting
mine. A small hand slips between arthritic fingers
unable to unlatch the harness of the car seat
that she mustn't wriggle out of.  Precious cargo, 
Isabella; daughter's daughter.  Mine for today.

Copyright Kathleen Jones


This is unashamedly sentimental.  I've just been back to England for a few days to look after my small grand-daughter  - a lovely, and exhausting, experience.  She's just beginning to talk and often difficult to interpret. My daughter is trying to bring her up to be bi-lingual, so some things she says are in Spanish, others in English.  'Abuela' is Spanish for grandmother, and I love it.   The biggest challenge, since I have the writers' curse, RSI, in my wrists, was locking and unlocking all the child-proof things - buggies and car seats etc.  A nightmare!

I'm also experimenting a bit with forms.  This one's ten lines, each line 12 syllables (approx), which is an interesting short form to work with. There are two lines that don't quite work yet, so more editing necessary!

For more Tuesday Poems please visit the main site:  www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

The Two Faces of Italy

I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment, 'The Dark Heart of Italy', which promises to enlighten my own ignorance of the tortuous pathways of Italian politics.

Italy is outwardly seductive - the beautiful landscape, history, art, food, wine and language.  But learning - or trying to learn! - that language has made me more aware of the duality here.  Just the word for icing sugar for example.  In English it implies decoration, enrichment, as in 'the icing on the cake', but in Italy it is a 'veil' concealing what is underneath.  This is a country where the word for cunning, 'furbo', also means cleverness and is used admiringly.

Two Faces of Italy - Catastrophe in an Idyllic Location - will Schettino ever face justice?

It's a country where the rich declare less than 50,000 euros a year in earnings and drive around in Ferraris and  Lamborghinis.  It's a country where most attempts to bring corrupt politicians and officials to justice usually founders in a maze of judicial bureaucracy.  It's called the 'muro di gomma' - the rubber wall everything bounces off.

While I'm on my terrace admiring the view, northern Italy is experiencing violent unrest - to watch the news you'd think half Italy was burning.  The 'No Tav' movement has blocked an autostrada and the railway lines to protest against a proposed fast rail link from Turin to Lyon.  There are burning barricades and violent clashes.

Elsewhere there are demonstrations against austerity measures.  One in three Italian youths doesn't have a job.  The fact that you have to know someone to get a job makes things doubly hard.  PM Monti has pledged to reform the labour market and create a meritocracy, but will it happen? or are the practices too deep rooted?  Like Japanese Knotweed in Britain, Nepotism is wild and out of control here.  You need a lot of 'furbo' to get anywhere.

Fancy a Cheap Ferrari?

In Italy, Berlusconi's replacement, Mario Monti, is busily trying to clean up the Italian state.   He's promising changes to the tax system - at the moment even the low-paid are taxed at 50%, which is why everyone avoids tax whenever possible.  The black economy is huge here.  But the rich are the biggest tax evaders of all and Monti is threatening to chase them up.  Which is why they're selling their Ferraris and buying something less eye-catching in an attempt to evade the dreaded Guardia di Finanza - a financial police force with blood-curdling powers!  So, if you want a testosterone boost, or fancy a display of machismo, the car dealers of Milan will probably be able to oblige with one of the rocket powered machines guaranteed to raise the CO2 levels of the planet even on a trip to the supermarket.  Sadly, I must confess that I do experience the odd moment of lust when one roars past my modest Peugeot on the road, but my sensible self soon re-asserts itself!

Tuesday Poem: Superior Corvid

One metre long from beak to tail-tip
more black than black and curious,
quick to mimic, clever, a problem-
solver, shape-shifter, solitary
but coupling for life. (They often
live for forty years.) Gate-keeper,
talisman, prognosticator, doom-
merchant. At a distance sometimes
mistaken for the common crow.

Kathleen Jones


This is one small raven poem from my growing 'Haida Gwaii' collection which is going to be called 'Sea, Tree and Bird' and which seems to be becoming more of a meditation on how we live with the environment, though it didn't start out that way.

The beautiful Raven photo was taken by Gavan Watson and is licensed under the Creative Commons agreement.

Spring has come to Capezzano

I’ve just come back from a very stormy England, tired and travel-lagged.  Pisa airport at midnight was very cold and damp and not unlike the UK airport I’d just left.  But waking up in our little house in the olive grove the following morning things looked very different.   Spring has really sprung in Capezzano.

               
The mimosa is flowering and the grass is starred with purple/pink anemones and tiny narcissi.  The creamy green hellebore we call ‘Easter Roses’ are everywhere.  The sun has warmth in it - enough to sit out and drink a glass of wine wearing only a jumper.  It certainly lifts the spirits.

It has obviously affected the cats as well.  Our adopted wild cat, Batcat, (who turned out to be female) has been sitting in the olive grove wowling at the spring sun (and everything else) in a very ominous way and it seems as though every tom cat in the village is strutting across our terrace trying to look suitably feral.  After dark there’s a great deal of tumbling and chasing and more singing - a kind of feline X-factor!  I fear this means kittens for Easter, but Batcat sadly isn’t tame enough to catch, put in a box and take to the vets.   Yet.

I was given a couple of preview copies of Young Adult novels to read when in the UK - ‘Wonder’ by P.J. Palacio and ‘Now is the Time for Running’ by Michael Williams -  neither of them out until the beginning of March. It’s interesting to read another genre, also interesting to see what publishers are buying from abroad - one was a best seller in America, the other in southern Africa before being brought over here.  UK publishers aren’t taking many risks these days.

Guest Post: Wendy Robertson on John McGahern's 'Amongst Women'

I'm on my way back to Italy at the moment, and it's a real treat to have best-selling novelist Wendy Robertson as a Guest Blogger to talk about writers' retreats and a particular writer, John McGahern,  whose novel 'Amongst Women' has meant a great deal to her.  Over to Wendy!

John McGahern -  Amongst Women

 I have participated in several writers retreats and now have run a few. Something significant always happens at writer’s retreats: they can be life changing events.

I met the late, great John McGahern at my first writer’s retreat at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire – a great place on the side of a hill with a scattering of garden huts furnished with a chair, a bench, and a great view of the countryside. I had been suffering from overwork and a loss of confidence.

At that time I’d had three children’s books published and was hungry – not to write  a better book as I knew writing for children can be the highest part of our calling – but I felt the need for  bigger scope and scale: the opportunity to fly higher, dig deeper. So I saved my hard earned pennies and went to Lumb Bank, exhausted, clutching half a novel and shot through with that down feeling you get in the middle of a novel. ‘What have I done? Is this any good? Is this no good? This is no good.’

 John McGahern was one of the two tutors on that retreat. I’d read The Dark – a masterpiece of a book – but knew little about the writer. A good tutor, he read my half-book and I shared my misgivings, my lack of confidence about it, and my sense of foolishness. He chuckled. ‘You’re surely joking, Wendy. Sure, I see you’re a great writer!’ And he went on to tell me why. He gave me the confidence to surge on and write many more adult novels. He treated me as an equal, a fellow artisan.

One morning we talk about an extract from my manuscript where a girl is walking with a basket up a bank.  She lifts up her skirt to show her friend where her brothers have kicked her, leaving boot marks on her thigh. John then talks with some intensity about how much one can render in fiction the dark things that have really happened to you.  And he tells me something so terrible it could not make its way onto even his pages which – always beautifully written – are undercut with the complex interplay of cruelty and control, love and loyalty inside the crucible of family life.  

His work is cut through with the chillingly honest view of his own difficult childhood which is a strong strand of most of his fiction, often dominated by the figure of the strong, cruel, seductive father. His fiction - emerging as it does out of his territory of rural Ireland - consistently reflects on the politics of family life where power, and even love, is wielded in subtle and brutal ways. He allows the reader access to these excesses by rendering the highly subjective experiences of his characters in a pared- back, detached style allowing the reader to infer the terrors for themselves. As well as this he allows us some rest for our emotions - with his great prose, his acute observation and lyrical rendering of time and season in rural Ireland. 

 Amongst Women, his 1990 prize-winning[1] novel, has at its centre just such a cruel controlling seductive father and husband. Michael Moran, an ex hero and a leader in the historical war against the British, wields total power over his family of three girls and a boy. Michael prefers family to friends and dominates his family using rituals of meals, domestic tasks and prayers as the syntax and grammar of his domination. (Brainwashing comes to mind…) There are physical aspects to his domination that have sexual undertones but the writing is too subtle for that to declare itself as incest.

Michael is handsome and has charm and is prepared to use it – as when he courts his second wife, Rose, so he can add her as caretaker and fellow-hero-worshipper to his brood of women. McGahern, though, shows Rose as the only one who, though loving Michael, holds out against his domination. This is logical. She has not been brainwashed by him since birth.

It is significant that the daughters, whom he bullies, manipulates and dominates, adore him and make excuses for him to each other and to Rose and other outsiders. And the final irony – and the brilliance of the perception in the writing – is that these women do not break down. At his death, around which the whole of this novel is tuned, they become their father. He has created them. He is in their hearts, in their skin, in their soul.

I have many other stories emerging from this particular writing retreat but this is the most important. Writing retreats, as I say, can change your life.

Wendy has two wonderful blogs of her own which you can check out at

http://www.lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com/

 http://wendysloveaffairwithbooks.blogspot.com/

 Wendy Robertson grew up in the North of England, one of four children whose widowed mother, an ex-nurse, worked in a factory. Wendy has worked as a teacher and lecturer, gaining a Masters whilst also writing short stories, articles, a column in the Northern Echo and novels for young adults.  She is the author of more than 25 novels, including the wonderfully titled,  'Sandie Shaw and the Millionth Marvell Cooker' (published by Headline).  She was Writer In Residence at Long Newton Prison, an experience that resulted in a novel 'Paulie's Web' now available on Amazon Kindle.  She is now part of the Room to Write group and writes and presents a radio programme 'The Writing Game'  for writers and readers on Bishop FM.  Her most recent books are a memoir, The Romancer, and two novels 'An Englishwoman in France' and 'A Woman Scorned'.

---

[1] Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literary Award (1991), GPA Award (1992), nominated for the Booker Prize (1990).

Tuesday Poem: Rae Armantrout - Making Poetry out of Crisis

Poets are expected to be contemporary and some even expect poetry to be subversive and offer solutions to (or at least analysis of) social turmoil.  Most of us remember, or carry around, scraps of poetry that have offered comfort or support in uncertain times, and some of us were maimed for life by having to learn the Charge of the Light Brigade at primary school!  But writing overtly 'political' poetry is very difficult and the results can be dire.   I found this fascinating video (link below) on the Poetry Foundation site.  Rae Armantrout, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, talks about how and why she writes about contemporary situations and reads some of the poems from her new collection 'Money Shot'.

The title has references only regular viewers of pornography might recognise - in these poems the financial 'exploitation and greed' that has ruined us all is identified as a different kind of pornography.  One reviewer writes that Rae Armantrout's poems  'work off the sleazy undercurrent of contempt and lazy petulance which one sees, or reads and hears expressed everywhere these days. The underlying quest of Armantrout's critique of our language is to identify and tag those elements which threaten to compromise our potential for goodness, or fulfillment, or ease.'  The poems themselves are deceptively spare.

Money Talks

1

Money is talking

to itself again

in this season's

bondage

and safari look,

its closeout camouflage.

Hit the refresh button

and this is what you get,

money pretending

that its hands are tied.

2

On a billboard by the 880,

money admonishes,

"shut up and play."

Interview and Readings here: - 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/313

For more wonderful Tuesday Poetry, please check out the Tuesday Poem website by clicking here.

Thanks for the comments

Thank you to everyone who sent me comments on the text - the general feeling was positive and I had several helpful suggestions.    I will now be starting on the Big Edit - working my way through the manuscript trying to hone it to perfection.  In a couple of weeks I'm going to post a list of editing musts put together by a friend and shared many times with students and other writers - a life saver! 

I'm doing a lot of travelling this week, but there will be  a Tuesday Poem and then novelist Wendy Robertson is doing a guest blog on the subject of Writers Retreats and the wonderful Irish novelist John McGahern.

I should be back in Italy by Friday, snow, wind and rain permitting!  I hope you're all having a good week wherever you are and whatever you're doing.

The Centauress - New Work In Progress.

Rodin:  The Centauress

This is the really scary bit - I've just finished the first draft of a fictional project I've been working on for a while.  A difficult story with a complicated plot, set in Istria - a traditionally Italian area of Croatia.  The two central figures are an elderly painter, Xenobia, who has led a controversial life, and her biographer, Alex, recently bereaved and trying to find the narrative of her own life again. I have no idea whether it will interest anyone other than myself.  I've been so immersed in it, I haven't been able to stop to think about what anyone else might think!  So, before I spend precious weeks re-writing and editing, I need to know if a reader would be interested enough to read on after the opening pages. These first pages are critical in any book - if you're not hooked by page 3 you usually give up.   That's why I'm pasting them below and would really appreciate honest, straight-forward comments from my lovely blog-readers.  Would you want to read on?  Or would you not?  You don't have to be tactful! If you'd like to email me your comments you can do that on kathyferber@yahoo.co.uk

The Centauress (working title)

Chapter One

London, October 2003

        ‘So, how would you feel about writing this book?’  Jane asked, a forkful of spinach and mozzarella pizza poised halfway between plate and mouth.
        Alex had realised how far down the ratings she’d sunk when her agent had asked her out to lunch and then suggested a Pizzeria on the South Bank rather than one of the smart bistros and wine bars that Jane usually favoured.  But in fact, considering her own long silence, the unanswered emails and the abandoned book contract, it was a miracle that Jane was still speaking to her at all.
       ‘Xenia’s marvellous,’ Jane put down her fork.  ‘So articulate!  And only the tiniest bit ga-ga -  she’s so eccentric you don’t even notice.   But apparently she’s very ill and it’s going to be vital to get everything down quickly before she deteriorates.’
     Even before the menus had arrived,  Alex had been aware that this lunch was simply an excuse for her agent to sell the notion she’d had on her recent holiday in a fortified village in Istria, owned by someone Jane described as ‘the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met’.
       ‘Xenia lived in England and America, knew Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, stayed in Paris with Picasso.  She even painted Marilyn Monroe for god’s sake!’
       Xenobia de Braganza, one of the most famous living painters, the grande dame of  the Veneto, who owned an entire Istrian hill village rented out to tourists in the summer (hence Jane’s visit) but in the winter filled it with her friends, creating a colony of artists and simpatici.
       ‘She seemed to like the idea,’ Jane said.  ‘Wants to tell the truth while she’s alive so that people can’t tell lies after she’s dead.  And I’ve talked to her London agent - no problems there.  It would be a good excuse for a retrospective in the Tate Modern.  Bloomsbury might be interested, and Harper Collins, providing I can get a good writer.  So I thought of you.   A spell in Istria might cheer you up.’

       Alex suppressed a sudden impulse to hit Jane hard across the face.  The surge of anger was so strong and physical, Alex could taste the bile in her mouth.  But, thanks to the little blue capsules of anaesthetic, prescribed by the doctor, Alex managed to contain her rage.   Why Jane should think a holiday would cure what she’d just been through was in-comprehensible.  Alex could only assume Jane had never experienced any kind of family tragedy or real pain in her entire life.  Alex’s whole world, her way of seeing everything was irrevocably altered.   It was like going back to the Tate Gallery after having become  colour blind;   the paintings would be there, still the same, but all the colour and life would have gone out of them.  There would be no point.

       Alex hasn’t written a word in almost two years.  The grief counselor she’d been assigned afterwards,  had recommended that she kept a journal to record her thoughts and feelings, but the journal too has remained obstinately blank.  The feeling still  persisted that there was no point in anything any more, but the grant from the Royal Literary Fund was almost spent and her small legacy down to single figures.
The flush of anger receded, leaving Alex feeling slightly shaky.   She held her tongue between her teeth for a moment longer and then asked.  ‘What’s the advance?’
       ‘We’ll have to negotiate that.  But her agent seems to think they can cover all your expenses to go out there on an initial visit - see how you get on with her, whether you like the idea.  Get a synopsis together based on the published material - there’s loads apparently.   Then I’ll try to sell it while you’re out there.  You speak Italian don’t you?   Of course it's Croatia now, but  Istria used to belong to Italy before it was Yugoslavia and they still speak the language.’
       Alex looked out of the window.  It was a cold autumn day with persistent drizzle.  Pedestrians in gloves and scarves were scurrying along the concrete walk-way of the South Bank.  An unkind wind was whipping the Thames into spiky waves.  Jane had just been talking about Istrian  sunshine, the citrus odour of the lemon tree below her window, describing the sunset in the Adriatic.   Alex was conscious of a great longing for warmth, colour and light.  Could she write this book?  Was she actually still capable?  It was the first time in two years that Alex had felt even the stirrings of an inclination.

        Alex spent the rest of that grey afternoon in the National Portrait Gallery looking at a canvas by Francis Bacon, early work but still with the characteristically dramatic strokes, the cruel drawing out of the figure.   Xenobia de Braganza’s name was on the label, but the painting didn’t give any clues to the reality of her appearance or character.  In another room was a photograph of her aged twenty five by Man Ray - a dark unruly head sculpted by light, jutting, furious brows, half closed eyes and the most beautiful, androgynous face Alex had ever seen.  The strong bone structure, voluptuous lips and brooding eyes could have belonged to either sex.    This was no ordinary person.   It was that face that decided her to tackle the biography.   

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



That's Chapter One -  all comments gratefully received.  Now I'm off to England for a brief visit to look after my small grand-daughter Isabella for a few days while my daughter is at a conference.  I'm really looking forward to spending time with her and hoping the English weather will be better than the Italian - which is still below zero.  Some parts of Italy have had 3 metres of snow, as far south as Sicily.  The worst winter in generations - that's what they're calling it.

Carnival in Viareggio

It's carnival time again in Viareggio, which is one of the best carnivals in Europe - famous for its gigantic floats, some of which are designed by leading artists.  This one is 'Anger', identified by its maker as the most problematic human emotion.

It's hard to convey the sheer joy of the carnival;   every kind of music - from Puccini to Abba - bouncing off the walls, whole families in fancy dress,

people dancing in the street, ankle deep in confetti and streamers.

And the sheer size of the floats - towering many stories above the buildings, and taking up the whole width of the road.

 
In between the floats, small parades, just as striking.

There's always a satirical theme - this year European politics took another beating.  We had Sarkozy as Napoleon on a horse

with Angela Merkel riding shot gun dressed (or undressed) as a dominatrix.

And it was hard not to connect this float with Captain Schettino of Concordia fame, steering the ship of Italy onto the rocks, a vulture on his shoulder, taking the whole of Europe with him,

though Berlusconi is in a life belt with three nubile mermaids (well, he would be wouldn't he?).

One of the most impressive floats was a visualisation of last year's Japanese Tsunami, with the motto 'On the surface we contemplate Flowers - underneath an Inferno'.  Video Link here.

Surrounded by Geishas with umbrellas and fans dancing out an impeccable choreography, it  was really moving.

I had a fabulous time and the weather stayed fine, temperatures around zero, but no wind or snow.


If you want to know what it sounds and feels like to be there - I found recommend this little video on You Tube filmed at last weekend's parade.  The final parade will be next week, but by then I'll be in England - unexpectedly.  Meanwhile, I've got to go and get the confetti and silly string out of my clothes!

The Pity of War - Romano Cagnoni

Watching the heavily edited and filtered images coming out of Syria at the moment, proved to be a sobering context for Romano Cagnoni's latest exhibition.   I've blogged about him before, when he had a small show in London, but this one is a big retrospective at the Palazzo Mediceo (the wonderful former home of the Medici family) in Seravezza.  Romano is probably Italy's greatest living photographer and has made his reputation  in war zones.  He specialised in going in under the radar and reaching the places the authorities didn't want anyone to see.

The result is a  narrative record of the terrible things that human beings do to each other.   His photographs of Biafra are brilliant, but too horrific for me to reproduce here.  He was also in Vietnam and in Croatia and Bosnia when Yugoslavia imploded.   His pictures of what was left of Vukovar are particularly shocking.

More recently he's been to Groszny to photograph the conflict in the Chechen Republic.

One of the most interesting things about the exhibition is Romano's commentary on what is, effectively, a record of his life.   Under a stunning black and white photo of a room full of men all sitting at separate tables in a bar, he writes that  'men's loneliness is linked with fear.  Men fear one another.'  And fear leads to war.

  
 And he sees the Chechen guerilla fighters as modern-day Greek heroes like Ulysses.

With his recent work he's been experimenting with a large format camera and huge colour prints that use landscape, colour and texture with the dexterity of a painter.  I'm afraid my poor little sony pot-shots can't even begin to convey the beauty of these photographs, or the size - the canvases above and below were both life-size.

As a writer, struggling with words, I do envy the amount of narrative that can be conveyed (without any translation) in a single image.  This is work of the highest possible calibre.  The exhibition lasts until 9th April.